For Instance

A bit earlier I remarked that I'd suddenly started to write in the third person. Maybe not well in the third person, but in the third person nevertheless. Here's the first page of a story that I started over the weekend, a post-WWII horror novel, that I may or may not actually finish, but it's striking to me that it's written in third person, and it wasn't a conscious decision on my part to write it in third person. In the immortal words of James Bond, "Shocking!"

And now, the first page of the story:


“Hey Captain, what are we looking for again?”

“Rocket parts.”

“Uh huh. Rocket parts. What do, uh, rocket parts look like, Captain?”

“You’ll know them if you see them,” Captain Howard said, though he secretly believed that it was another dead end, or maybe what they called a dry hole in Texas. Well, not so dry, what with the groundwater seeping and dripping out of the tunnel roof like the tears of the earth itself, but certainly a hole. What was the name of this one? Emmenthaler 8. Just another dry hole.

Corporal Blowfish lapsed into silence as the group of men slowly walked along the railroad tracks in the tunnel, the five blobs of yellow light from their dog-leg GI flashlights wobbling around them like so many timid ghosts. In the gloom and shadows Captain Howard could see a good deal of stuff, but nothing that looked useful. Capsized file cabinets bearing hand-sized patches of scabby rust. Bunk bed frames made out of metal tubing, now twisted and bent into useless shapes dripping with condensation. Here and there human detritus in the form of an abandoned boot, a mildewed cap with its red-white-black German cockade looking as out of place as a cat-eye marble in black Louisiana mud.

Dry hole, and fortunately a short hole. Howard could see the end of the railroad tunnel just ahead, wet rock glistening where the Krauts had simply stopped digging. What would they want with a tunnel like that, a simple tunnel with a railroad track in it that simply ended about a hundred yards in? He couldn’t think of a reason, but he knew better than to second-guess the Krauts. With a fiendish imagination like theirs, even this stupid dumb box canyon of a tunnel took on a strange sinister aspect, as though the Nazis had dug it with the specific purpose of capturing and killing Captain James R. Howard and his band of four brothers, bored and inattentive young infantrymen on dubious loan to him from some ridiculously high-numbered infantry division – the two thousand and thirty-third or something equally absurd.

Howard stopped, listening to the strange overlapping echoes of their boots scraping on the dirt and grit on the concrete floor of the tunnel and the steady dripping of water. He had a pretty good idea of what to look for in these Nazi tunnels – hatches, electrical conduits, overhead lights, floor drains, things that betrayed the possibility of Higher Purpose than simple covered parking – and though he hadn’t seen anything in this particular tunnel, it didn’t hurt to make sure.

“Anyone see any side tunnels or anything?” he asked.

“Just the vent shaft,” one of the soldiers said, a lanky young man who never seemed to get more than about two feet away from his automatic rifle. The yellow blobs of government-issue light wobbled and fluttered like moths, gravitating toward the metal grating in the roof that probably covered a simple ventilation hole. Up above, the upper end was probably concealed in a doghouse or a Catholic shrine or something equally harmless – the Nazis hardly missed a trick. But the shaft was probably four or five inches in diameter, not nearly big enough to be the magic door leading to the kind of underground realm that Howard was interested in.

“Okay. That’s it, back outside.”

“Yeah,” the lanky soldier with the Browning Automatic Rifle said glumly. “Out of the dripping and into the rain.” His Zippo flared in the gloom, almost blinding Howard, and a little voice inside him thought it’s a good thing we didn’t actually find what we’re looking for, or we’d be dead right now.